ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the poem's preoccupation with various kinds of people dependent on wage-labour and alms, its conceptualization of poverty, and its representation of the poor together with their communities. Piers Plowman generates great difficulties in those spheres and the chapter aims to describe these, their sources, and some of their consequences. The chapter seeks to contribute to the work of historians who have shown how changing attitudes to the poor and changing ideas about poverty provide major insights into prevalent mentalities and the processes of cultural transformation. It also seeks to contribute to our understanding of Piers Plowman, preoccupied as it was with a quite specific moment in English cultural history. Before looking at aspects of England after the Black Death which Langland found most disturbing, the author offers an inevitably schematized account of the contrasting attitudes to poverty and the poor available in Langland's culture.
